When art imitates art

Grant Wood's much-parodied double portrait, American Gothic, has somehow come to posses a resonance and ubiquity out of all proportion to its ostensible subject. Serena Davies reviews Steven Biel's "excellent and convincing" examination of a question of national identity.

Serena Davies

12:01AM BST 28 Aug 2005

Serena Davies reviews American Gothic by Steven Biel

An image of American Gothic, the somewhat inscrutable double portrait that is the subject of this book, appears in the opening titles of the television show Desperate Housewives. This strange, severe image of a man and woman, he brandishing a pitchfork, standing in front of a plain white house in whose gable nestles a thin window in the gothic style, stands as one of a series of iconic, ever-mutating artworks reaching from Van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait to Warhol's soup can.

American Gothic is, of course, a very well-known painting. But, unlike the others, it is also a painting more often parodied than faithfully presented. A Google picture search reveals hundreds of reimagined versions. It provides particularly apt material for Desperate Housewives, since the picture is popularly understood to represent the righteous, godly values of small-town American life, values that the cynical television series, also set in small-town America, does its best to reveal as bogus.

Steven Biel, director of the history and literature course at Harvard University, has written a book that examines why American Gothic has come to have the resonance and ubiquity it does. He describes it as America's most famous painting - an assessment that may be true for those within the country, but isn't beyond. Whistler's portrait of his mother, or Warhol's Marilyns, are far more internationally celebrated. They are also, to offer the qualitative assessment that Biel sidesteps until the end, much better art.

But, unlike these - or the Mona Lisa - American Gothic isn't famous because it is good, otherwise people might be able to remember who painted it. Only five of the 59 sophomores on Biel's Harvard programme (presumably a brainy bunch) were able to identify its author: Grant Wood, an Iowan artist associated with the home-loving Regionalist movement that flourished briefly in the Midwest in the 1930s.

The reason it is famous, and particularly so in the States, is because it has become linked to the country's national identity. The American Gothic couple are, in the phrase of Wanda Corn, the art historian whose 1983 essay has hitherto been the only lengthy study of the painting, "Mr and Mrs America".

Biel explains how this has come about. The image, set in Iowa and painted in 1930, was first understood to evoke the hardworking "pioneer" spirit of the Midwest. Then, in the mid-1930s, it became popular to identify Midwestern values with those of America as a whole. This shift was triggered by the Great Depression, when the sophisticated, industrialised East proved incapable of fending for itself, yet the still-rural West achieved comparative self-sufficiency.

Suddenly, being stony-faced, frugal and God-fearing symbolised survival and the "true" American spirit - and American Gothic, on public display in the Chicago Art Institute from the year it was painted, went from regional genre painting to emblem of nationhood. The parodies, which proliferated from the 1960s, then served to confirm its status as an icon, since they rely for their joke on an understanding of the American Gothic couple as anonymous, average Americans.

The meaning of the painting, says Biel, has always been defined by the historical context in which it has been viewed, even in spite of the artist's own intentions. Although Wood claimed to admire his subjects, the picture was first taken to be a satire - "that woman's face could sour milk", observed one early viewer - because the mood of many intellectuals at the time was to denigrate the perceived philistinism of the Midwest. Wood also said that the couple were father and daughter (possibly at the behest of his sister Nan, who posed for it along with a local dentist considerably older than she) but the parodies prefer that they are husband and wife. The two have been supplanted with the faces of presidents and their first ladies innumerable times.

This is an excellent and convincing book, hampered only a little by its dry delivery. Unlike some of the higher-flown imaginings of art history, Biel never extrapolates too far - his subject is so fertile, he doesn't have to. Americans have been obsessed by this painting for 75 years. Thanks to the parodies, everything from the civil rights movement to Paris Hilton has been reinterpreted through its prism. They provide a potted cultural history of America itself.

Biel is also on to a topical theme. George W Bush's concerted appeal to Bible Belt conservatism in the last presidential campaign demonstrated that American Gothic values (non-satirically interpreted) can win you a 21st-century election. Perhaps this is a reason to hail the prescience of Grant Wood - but considering, as Biel points out, that "one likely point of agreement between viewers… then and now is that the people in the painting aren't having any fun", it may also be a cause for some concern.